Peter Camenzind (11 page)

“You're from the mountain country, aren't you?” she asked. “I wonder if you could describe it to me. My brother tells me no one but Camenzinds live in your village. Is that true?”

“Practically,” I muttered. “There's Füssli the baker, and there's an innkeeper by the name of Nydegger.”

“And the rest are all Camenzinds? Are they all related?”

“More or less.”

I handed her a sketch. She held the sheet in such a way that I saw she knew how something like that should be handled, and I told her as much.

“You praise me, but like a teacher.” She laughed.

“Don't you want to look at the sketch?” I asked brusquely. “If not, I can put it back with the others.”

“What is it of?”

“San Clemente.”

“Where?”

“Near Fiesole.”

“Have you been there?”

“Yes, a few times.”

“What does the valley look like? This doesn't give you much of an idea.”

I thought for a moment. The stark yet beautiful landscape came into view and I half closed my eyes to hold on to the image. It was a little while before I spoke again, and I was pleased that she had not interrupted me. She seemed to realize that I was meditating.

Then I described San Clemente as it lies parched and immense, bearing the brunt of the sun on a summer afternoon. In nearby Fiesole there is industry; people weave straw hats and baskets, or hawk souvenirs and oranges, or cheat tourists or beg from them. Florence, where the old and the new mingle, lies even farther down the valley. But Fiesole and Florence are out of sight of San Clemente. No painter has worked there, no Roman monument was erected there; human history passed this desolate valley by. Only the sun and rain do battle with the earth there, crooked pine trees maintain a precarious existence, and with their lean tops the few cypresses feel the air for oncoming storms that will cut short the miserable lives to which their parched roots cling. Occasionally an oxcart from a neighboring dairy farm will come by, or a farmer and his family will wander past on their way to Fiesole, but these are chance visitors, and the red skirts the farm women wear, which seem so smartly gay elsewhere, are out of place in San Clemente, so you don't mind leaving them out of the picture.

I told her how I had hiked through the valley with a friend, had rested at the feet of cypress trees and leaned against their slender trunks; and how the sad and beautiful magic of the strange, lonely valley had reminded me of the valleys at home.

Then we were both silent.

“You are a poet,” said the girl after a moment.

I made a face.

“I don't mean it that way,” she went on. “Not because you write stories, but because you understand and love nature. It doesn't matter to most people that the wind sings in the trees or that a mountain shimmers in the sunlight. But you find life in all this, a life you can partake of.”

I replied that no one understood nature and that all searching and all desire to comprehend really complicated matters more and made one melancholy. A tree bathed in sunlight, a weathered stone, an animal, a mountain, each has life, has a tale to tell, is alive, suffers, endures, experiences joy, dies—but we don't understand it.

As I talked, soothed by her patience and attentiveness, I looked at her more closely. Her gaze was fixed on my face, her expression calm and rapt with interest as though she were a child—or, rather, like an adult who forgets himself entirely while listening and whose eyes, unselfconsciously, again become those of a child. And as I observed her, little by little I realized, with the naïve joy of revelation, that she was very beautiful.

When I ceased speaking, she too was silent. Then, as if startled by something, she squinted into the lamplight.

“I don't know your name, you know,” I said suddenly.

“Elizabeth.”

She left me and soon afterwards was asked to play the piano. She played well. But when I joined the group at the piano I noticed she was no longer quite as beautiful.

As I walked down the comfortably old-fashioned staircase, I overheard a snatch of conversation between two painters who were putting on their coats in the hall.

“At least he had a good time flirting with Elizabeth,” one of them said, laughing.

“Still waters…” said the other. “He didn't pick the worst one either.”

So those fools were already gabbing. It occurred to me that I had confided the most intimate thoughts and a good portion of my memories to this young girl, confided in her almost against my will. What had made me do it? And they were already talking, the bastards.

I went away and avoided the house for several months. By chance, one of those two painters was the first to broach the subject when I met him in the street.

“Why aren't you coming to the house any more?”

“Because I'm sick of their damned gossip!”

“Oh, yes, those women!” he laughed.

“No,” I retorted. “I mean the men, our artist friends in particular.”

During these months I saw Elizabeth only a few times on the street, once in a shop and once in the art museum. Usually she looked pretty, never beautiful. There was something unusual about the movement of her overly slim body, which, though generally it suited her, could also seem exaggerated or artificial. But that time in the museum, she was beautiful—beautiful beyond words. She did not notice me sitting on the side leafing through the catalogue; she was standing nearby, completely absorbed in a large Segantini. The painting depicted several farm girls working on sparse meadows, in the background jagged mountains which reminded me of the Stockhorn range, and above it all, in a cool, transparent sky, an exceedingly well-rendered ivory cloud. It made you reel when you set eyes on it: from its knotted, involuted mass you could see that the wind had just packed and kneaded it; the cloud was about to soar and drift away. Elizabeth had grasped this and yielded to it completely. And her soul, usually veiled, once more revealed its inner face, laughed softly out of wide-open eyes, made her small mouth childishly soft, and smoothed out the clever, severe fold between her brows. The beauty and genuineness of a great work of art made her soul display its own beauty and truth.

I sat quietly to the side, contemplating the beautiful Segantini cloud and the lovely girl under its spell. Then I became afraid that she would turn around and want to talk to me and lose her beauty again, so quickly and silently I left the room.

At this time I began again to delight in nature, and my attitude toward it underwent a change. Time and time again I roamed through the magnificent country surrounding the town, mainly into the Jura, which I liked best of all. Whenever I saw these woods, mountains, meadows, and orchards, I sensed that they stood there waiting for something. Perhaps for me, but certainly for love.

And so I began to love all these things. An overpowering longing within me responded to their silent beauty and, within myself as well, there arose the yearning to be conscious, understood, and loved.

Many people say they “love nature,” by which they mean they don't dislike the charms nature displays before them. They go on outings, delight in the beauty of the earth as they trample meadows and tear off flowers and sprigs, only to discard them or let them wilt at home. That is how they love nature. This love overcomes them on Sundays when the weather is fine and they are moved by the goodness of their hearts. Actually they have no need for such feelings, for isn't man “the crowning glory of nature”? Yes, of course, the crown!

So I peered more and more greedily into the abyss of things. I listened to the wind sing in the trees, listened to brooks roar through gorges and gentle streams glide through the plains, and I knew these sounds were the language of God: if I understood their dark, archaic, beautiful language, it would be the rediscovery of paradise. Books make little mention of this. It is the Bible that contains the wonderful expression “the groaning and travailing of creation.” Yet I felt that men through the ages had been overwhelmed by the ineffable in life, had abandoned their daily tasks and fled into seclusion to hearken to the song of creation, to contemplate the fleeting clouds, restlessly and longingly as hermits, penitents, and saints to implore the Eternal.

Have you ever been in Pisa, in the Camposanto? Its walls are covered with the faded frescoes of past centuries, one of them depicting the life of hermits in the Theban desert. Despite its faded colors, the naïve picture exudes such bliss and peace that grief suddenly overwhelms you and you long to weep away your sins and wickedness in some remote and holy place, never to return. Innumerable artists have sought thus to express their homesickness—in marvelous paintings. Any one of Ludwig Richter's affectionate paintings of children sings the same song as the frescoes in Pisa.

Why did Titian, who loved the present and the physical, endow some of his lucidly representational paintings with a background of tenderest blue? Just one brushstroke of warm, deep blue. Whether it manifests distant mountains or limitless space, one cannot tell. Titian the realist did not himself know. He did not do it for reasons of color harmony, as the art historians would have it. It was his tribute to the ineffable, which was deeply alive in the soul of even this happy, lighthearted man. Art, it seemed to me, had sought in all ages to provide a language for the mute longing of the divine within us.

St. Francis expressed this more beautifully and completely, yet in a more childlike way. Only now did I really understand him. By encompassing the love of earth, plants, stars, animals, storms, and seas in his love of God, he superseded the Middle Ages, even Dante, to discover the language of the eternally human. He calls all creation and natural phenomena his dear brothers and sisters. Later in life, when the doctors ordered that he have his forehead seared by a red-hot iron, he greeted the terrible instrument as his “dear brother, the fire,” despite his dread of pain.

As I learned to love nature as if it were a person, to listen to it as if to a comrade or traveling companion speaking a foreign tongue, my melancholy, though not cured, was ennobled and cleansed. My eyes and ears were sharpened, I learned to grasp nuances of tone and subtleties of distinction. I longed to put my ear nearer and nearer to the heartbeat of every living thing, so as to understand perhaps, perhaps one day be granted the gift of expressing this heartbeat in poetry which others would awaken to. This pulse would send them to the springs of all rejuvenation and purification. But this was only a fervent wish, a dream … I did not know whether it would be fulfilled and concentrated on what was close to hand: I offered my love to every visible thing and set myself to regard nothing with indifference or contempt.

It is impossible to express the revitalizing, soothing effect this had on my somber life. Nothing is nobler or more joyful than an unspoken, constant, dispassionate love, and if I have a heartfelt wish, it is that a few, or even one or two, of my readers be brought to learn this pure and blessed art. Some are born knowing this love and practice it unawares throughout their lives—these are God's favorites, the good children among men. Some learn it at the expense of great suffering, which is evident if you have ever noticed the resolute, quiet, glowing eyes of some cripples or victims of misfortune. If you don't care to listen to me and my poor words, visit those who have overcome and transfigured their suffering through dispassionate love.

I myself am still pitifully far from achieving this state of perfection that I have venerated in many who have suffered. Throughout the years I rarely lacked the consoling belief that I knew the right path. Yet it would be false to say that I never strayed from it, for I rested whenever I could and was not spared many a wrong turn. Two selfish tendencies warred within me against genuine love. I was a drunkard and I was unsociable. Though I cut down considerably on my intake of wine, I would still surrender completely every few weeks to the guile of the god of the vine leaves. Yet it was only rarely that I would spend the night in some drunken escapade or sprawled out on the street—the god of wine loves me and tempts me to drink only when his spirit and mine enter into friendly dialogue. Nonetheless, I would feel guilty for a long stretch after one of my bouts. But, of all things, I could not give up my love of wine, for I had inherited too strong a bent from my father. For years I had fostered this legacy with care and piety, and made it thoroughly my own. So I helped myself out of this predicament by entering into a half-serious, half-mocking pact. My Franciscan song of praise from now on included “my dear brother, wine.”

Chapter Six

A
NOTHER WEAKNESS OF MINE
was even more troublesome: I disliked people generally, and lived as a recluse, inclined to greet any human touch with mockery or disdain.

When I first resolved to lead a new life I did not give this much thought; it seemed proper to leave other people to fend for themselves and to reserve all my tenderness, devotion, and sympathy for mute nature. At night, before going to bed, I would suddenly remember a hill, the edge of a wood, some favorite solitary tree that I had neglected for a long time. Now it stood in the night wind, dreaming, slumbering perhaps, sighing, its branches trembling. What did it really look like at this very moment? I would leave the house, find the tree, and peer at its indistinct shape in the darkness. I regarded it with astonished tenderness, carrying its dusky image back home with me.

You'll smile. This love may have been mistaken, yet it was not wasted. The only question was how I would find my way from a love of nature to love of mankind.

Well, once you've made a beginning, the rest always follows on its own. The idea of my great poetic creation hovered before my mind's eye; it seemed even more possible than before. And what if my love of nature should enable me to speak the language of woods and streams—for whom would I be doing this? Not solely for those I was fondest of, but really for the sake of a mankind I wanted to lead toward love, even teach to love. Yet with most people I was uncouth, scornful, and unloving. I felt this split within myself and knew I must struggle against unfriendliness. This was difficult because my isolation and personal circumstances made me harsh and mean, especially in social relations. It was not enough to be a little less severe at home or at the tavern, or occasionally to greet a passer-by on the street. Besides, as soon as I tried this I realized how thoroughly my relationships with people had deteriorated: even when my gestures were not hostile, they were greeted with coolness or suspicion—people thought I was mocking them. The worst of it was that for over a year I had avoided the home of the scholar, my only real acquaintance. I realized I would have to call there first if I wanted to have an entree into social life as lived in this town.